As somebody who has:
(1) At a management level, chosen and implemented and defended unpopular and objectively clunky enterprise software;
(2) As a user, been riled by the utter degeneracy of clunky enterprise software chosen and implemented and defended by others;
(3) As a developer, had to splice additional functionality into crufty enterprise software;
I have come to the conclusion that the main reason enterprise software sucks is because those who choose it are not those who are condemned to use it, and draw benefits (such as additional data) without paying any of the daily costs in maddening workflows and utterly shitty user experience.
Why Enterprise Software Sucks
201–210 of 570 posts
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#202At my university, I think they used to use blackboard, but we have since migrated to a homegrown solution, partially built by students. Some professors also use Instructure. I think the consensus among the students is, however, the homegrown solution is better.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#203I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…
> prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business
True - and this is why the huge software spend rarely produces productivity benefits. Because the software-enabled workflow should be different from the pre-software workflow.
But every organisation has two parallel workflows: the one written in the manual and the one everybody actually performs. The more rigid the organisation, the more likely these are to diverge. In a paper-and-humans system, the humans can make up for the deficiencies in the "official" workflow. In the automated system, it's baked in.
Lots of big failed deployments replace a human-judgement system that was working "unofficially" with a machine-implemented one that doesn't work at all, because the process as written didn't work. And of course it's impossible to tell management that the process doesn't work in that kind of environment.
(Hence the huge advantage of Kaizen - make the official process match the one that actually works for humans)
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use. It's definitely not a tool for developers.
People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well. Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages.
The times when this was decided are remote in terms of computing. We're probably talking about mid-eighties. Excel is an office tool, and probably most of its users work in offices where not a single word of English is spoken, ever. So I don't think it was "asked by the users" but rather what's expected from a basic office tool, to be localised in your language.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're being confused by the surface appearance of things, rather than paying attention to their fundamental nature. Maybe that's why you weren't able to understand the arrogant Vim guy's utterance and wrote him off as delusional instead of figuring out in what sense he might be saying something true. It's good that you did figure it out eventually even if you couldn't hear it from him. Unix wasn't dis…
I understand your point about Vim not following Unix philosophy, also the way Vim and Blender are similar. I disagree that the GUI/command line divide is a "surface appearance". I'm not talking about Vim/VS Code kind of thing, where one is implemented in the command line, the other in the GUI, but are basically the same. I'm talking about apps which fundamentally require a pointing device. In Photoshop you point at a…
Vim is not a command-line program. It's a screen editor. The command-line equivalents are Perl, ex, and sed.
I agree that writing +100+200x17x25 is a terrible UI design for drawing. But you’ll notice that Vim doesn't use such an interaction design for text; and typing the 100 and 200 into the properties box of a Quartz Composer processing node doesn't make it any better. So it sounds like you're attacking a straw man, maybe unintentionally.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. I'd refine your examples somewhat. The author's idea of "enterprise software" would be more like SAP/Salesforce/JIRA. A client-server model type of software (data lives in big central corporate databases) instead of being documents-oriented (user data lives in files like .xlsx, .docx, .psd). In contrast, the other desktop software of Photoshop/Word/Excel is often bought…
But there are enterprise versions of Word, Excel, and a few others. And it's worth taking a look at what those versions add. By and large, being able to centrally manage and update from the IT department, and even being able to deploy additional content (plug-ins, templates, etc). So, they're not client-server, but they do add a server into the mix. The other common set of features is related to distribution and acce…
Regardless, the purpose and core features of Word and Excel have not changed in 20+ years. MS Word is a Word Processor. Its purpose is to input and format text. Excel is a spreadsheet. It's purpose is to be an interactive way to organize data in tables.
Mentioning them as an example of "Enterprise Software" without specifically clarifying the Enterprise-features you're talking about is a mistake at best and disingenuous at worst.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#207Enterprise software doesn't have to suck. I worked on databases for oil & gas and similar systems and even though the UI wasn't the best, it was an off the shelf solution that many customers could use their complex problems and regulatory needs. If ease of use is your only metric of quality then lots of Enterprise software sucks, but if you measure quality by how effectively it solves a problem for a customer, Enterprise software might not look so bad. Also blackboard might suck (as a student it didn't strike me as horrible), but there are good tools in the same industry like Piazza.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies like Basecamp and Trello are here to prove that assertion wrong. Basecamp is in every fortune-500 company more than once and never officially. Why? Because you don't need IT to approve it first and it's price is just under what most managers can stick on their company credit card. One of Basecamp's mottos is "Do Less". It's also worth pointing out that the simpler the software, the more likely it is to fit…
Totally agree, but it takes a really strong product manager to stand up to a sales person with $10K in revenue from an enterprise buyer "if we just add this one feature they want". The fact that the enterprise buyer doesn't actually need the feature, or could do it easier/cheaper/better is immaterial. A Purchasing Department worker in the enterprise is looking at your product and Product X, and Product X has that fea…
Product managers also need to stop living in idealized bubbles and actually understand their users and customers. What they want can at times can be dirty or ugly, and require PMs to challenge engineering stakeholders. There needs to be give and take there. Often PMs are getting crunched in the middle and don't have the wherewithal to deal with these situations.
Requirements also change over time and PMs can end up chasing a vision that doesn't exist. If PMs get out of their bubble and acknowledge this more they'd be trusted since there would be alignment on the long-term value for the customer and therefore sales. There are times that PMs need to show backbone when dealing with sales, or leadership, on features that might derail the product, but this doesn't have to be the default.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That enterprise software may very well be the best software that includes all those needed features. How come you can't have something nice & even decently working for: pay, HR, vacation, expenses tracking? Or more, how is it possible that obviously unfit and malfunctioning solutions (for problems that have been known, solved and specified for years) are still on the market in 2019 in companies that pretend to be s…
Pay, HR, and expense tracking are extremely complex areas due to federal / state / local labor laws, collective bargaining agreements, and individual organizational policies. Any application which deals with all those complexities will inevitably be full of defects and usability problems. There is no solution, it's simply reality.
> Any application which deals
The problem here is putting the cart before the horse and expecting the software to implement policies for you. If you can't design a workflow to work and be compliant without new software, you probably do not know enough about your own workflow to purchase software that will actually improve it.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except MS is countering with MS Teams, which is truly enterprise ready in the same sense as the Twitter thread describes.
Except MS Teams suuuuucks compared to Slack. The interface just isn't intuitive and you can't just use it. The number of times I miss things because I didn't realize my input was needed, or I'm still getting notified on threads that only needed a single comment from me way back at the start of the conversation that I no longer need to be a part of is ridiculous. My tools should get out of the way and let me do my job…
I think that's their point, Teams is the 18 button baby outfit.